Women authors must drop domestic themes

As a judge in this year's Orange prize, it's hard to ignore the sheer volume of thinly disguised autobiographical writing on motherhood and boyfriend troubles. Why do these women authors not dream, dare and invent?

If this year's Orange Prize longlist were a benchmark of women's literary health then we would have little to worry about, as it demonstrates that women authors at the top of their game have no trouble thinking big, inventing and dreaming. But while these wonderful authors are representative of the very best women writers they are not, sadly, representative of the majority of women authors currently being published.

Judging by the increasing lack of inventiveness and imagination amongst too many, though not all, women authors it would seem that we have either been persuaded to stay within a narrow experience in order to be "taken seriously", or more worryingly we are cautiously self-censoring because we are afraid of the gathering forces that are threatening feminism both domestically and internationally. As a judge in this year's Orange prize, it's hard to ignore the sheer volume of thinly disguised autobiographical writing from women on small-scale domestic themes such as motherhood, boyfriend troubles and tiny family dramas. These writers appear to have forgotten the fundamental imperative of fiction writing. It's called making stuff up.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest that personal experience should never be plundered by novelists. The list of those geniuses who have done so is long, from Austen through to Doris Lessing and Alice Walker to name but a tiny, random few. Indeed, several authors on the Orange long list have drawn deeply on their own life events, but they have used them to create bigger, ambitious tales, that speak louder than lazily fictionalised personal anecdote could ever do.

No one can expect women writers to suddenly buck the trends that have moulded them for decades, but we can keep the question of what constrains us in fiction writing as a living debate.

The first hurdle is to convince women that if they break free of those gender constraints, they will still be relevant and still be taken as seriously as the quality of their work demands. The Orange prize is a leading force in assisting this, and the fact that all three major literary prizes will have gone to women authors shows that when women dream and dare and invent, they are in every way equal to their male rivals.